The role of a GM

[Suzerain]

Following on from the tradition of D&D, most games have a role analogous to the Dungeon Master. It might be called something else (MC, GM, Storyteller, Referee, etc.) but the idea that one person at the table has a special role in the running of the game is common. What varies is exactly how much power this role entails, which emerges from the decisions they are responsible for and the responsibilities they have. I'm just putting up a few categories off the top of my mind in no particular order, if anyone can add or comment on this please do.

GM as omnipotent Tyrant-Deity: The upper limit of potential GM power. Exists per the rules in Bearworld and other irredeemably shit systems. Can, at least in the case of Bearworld, arbitrarily turn success into failure and is encouraged to do so. See also John Wick (the RPG industry personality, not the film) school of fuckery, which is broadly applicable to any game, where any strength is inverted and any weakness hammered. Or the new Rick and Morty D&D5 supplement, which gives advice of this nature.

Viking Hat GM: Distinguished from the above by the fact that the above are actively malevolent in their exercise of power. GMs of this category are at best well-meaning railroad builders or at worst not interested in what their players want rather than actively antagonistic to it. Exercises total power over every aspect of the game at all times, with no limits on power. About the upper threshold of what D&D encourages, and enabled by the rules in most editions (sort of barring 3e, which is a special case).

GM as mostly impartial referee: The theoretical role of the GM in early editions of D&D, although for various reasons the Viking Hat GM seems to occupy the memetic space of what actually went on. Exists only to impersonally enforce the rules, with a bit of tweaking to patch any holes in them or adjudicate situations not covered by them.

GM as fun-enabler: Common in rules-lite systems such as FATE, where the GM is more of a facilitator of fun than a hard-and-fast rules enforcer. D&D5 claims to be here, but its design encourages Viking Hat GM (or Tyrant-Deity in some supplements).

Mixed Bag: 3.X all falls in here for a simple reason. The DMG and other books talk about Rule 0 and GM's word being law, but the actual rules content itself allows a lot of player agency provided you have access to magic. The sheer breadth of player-available content suggests that the GM as the referee is the intended category, but actual in-text information contradicts this.

[Iduno]

For me, GMing was finding/creating the background characters, locations, set-pieces, and the hook for the story (get McGuffin from X), and sometimes a twist in the story (X also has a body double, make sure you get the right one). When game day arrived, I just sat and listened to them fill in the plot and let them know what they observed.

Adding a twist to the story can also be seen as screwing with the players, but even the players will admit that it gets boring if every story is straightforward. If players find a way around something, that's just what happens.

[Suzerain]

Because my brain is extremely small, until I read Iduno's post I totally forgot.

GM as storywriter: This could be an axis all on its own. Combining it with other categories is demonstrative. Viking Hat GMs end up being the frustrated novelist type, for whom the rules of the game are an impediment. GM as referee types lean more towards what Iduno is talking about, setting the pieces in place for a story and seeing what the players do. GM as fun-enabler usually latch onto PC stories or run with whatever the PCs think is cool for plots.

[Josh_Kablack]

Not sure it's a category, but I always thought that Producer / Director was a more useful description of the GM's role. Yeah, it's a person with more authority over the production, but also radically different responsibilities from the others involved.

[Grek]

I have a very similar take on GMs!

FROZEN GMS run bad awful games, like Bad Game 3.14e or Flaycock Next.
CHILLY GMS run games that are not totally awful, but are still not fun, like Abstraction.
STP GMS are strictly theoretical; all true GMs are actually one of the other kinds.
WARM GMS run games that I enjoy greatly, such as Cake & Blowjobs.
ICY HOT GMS run games that I have mixed feelings about, such as Puppyball, where I like that there are puppies but dislike that the puppies are used as sports balls.

As you can see, the physical temperature of the GM running the game is directly related to how good of a game they run. It follows that a rousing game of Cake & Blowjobs could only be improved by setting the MC (master cheferee) on fire.

[Grek]

Okay, so the server gave me "could not insert new word matches" and then posted this three times. Good on it.

[Grek]

see above

But more seriously, let's take a look at the post which prompted this dumbass rant, since I have a post to do it in:

Bullshit. Absolute nonsense bullshit. Toxic people absolutely still play D&D5, and in fact the system encourages toxic GM-player power dynamics. The GM already has disproportionately more power in a game by the social factor of there being more demand for GMs than for players. A given player can easily be replaced, but a GM leaving means the game ends. Add onto this D&D's long history of GMs having total control over every aspect of the game except the PCs actions, and D&D5s additional fellating in the form of "GM empowerment", and you've got a flame for power hungry moths. The skill system having no defined outputs (thereby allowing a GM to set DC fuckhuge if a player succeeding on a given roll would disturb their precious wank session plot) and adv/disadv being mostly handed out on the basis of GM toe-sucking don't help either.

It's only rules-incomplete* when interacting with the world in any way other than trying to stab it. As soon as that combat music starts it becomes much more rules-heavy as it shifts to grid-based tactical combat. And if you genuinely believe D&D5 combat works as Theater-of-the-Mind, I have bridge to sell you. You could maybe make shit up with D&D5 as an inspiration that works as TotM, but you could do that without buying 900 pages of book too, and probably have more fun doing it.

*I say rules-incomplete rather than rules-lite, because of the skills. A rules lite would have a system here that actually allows you to do things, if it had one at all rather than leaving things as MTP. As-written, the skill system of 5e currently fails to accomplish literally anything by virtue of having no outputs. Skills don't allow you to do anything. At the most charitable, they allow the GM to decide on an arbitrary whim whether or not you can do something. But that's worse than just MTP because at least in MTP the players get a say.

The basic argument here is that because 5e skills system is functionally nonexistent (true premise), it empowers toxic GMs to act tyrannically. That is the exact opposite of true. People who want to abuse a system will preferentially choose a system where an abundance of rules exist to shield the GM from criticism. The best tool in a malicious GM's arsenal is the claim that they're not deciding to dick you over, they're just 'following the rules' and you must be a whiny crybaby if you want the GM to make a special exception just for you and your vulnerable little feelings. The 5e skill rules exist to pass the buck from the design to the GM, to make sure that any failures get blamed on individual GMs 'playing incorrectly' and not on the 5e dev team's incompetence.

There are many problems with 5e. It is an awful system. But it is awful in the exact opposite way that this suggests.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

What is the purpose of this categorization, exactly?

[Iduno]

What is the purpose of this categorization, exactly?

I assume Grek is flexing on how badly their brain works.

[Iduno]

What is the purpose of this categorization, exactly?

I assume Grek is flexing on how badly their brain works.

The basic argument here is that because 5e skills system is functionally nonexistent (true premise), it empowers toxic GMs to act tyrannically. That is the exact opposite of true. People who want to abuse a system will preferentially choose a system where an abundance of rules exist to shield the GM from criticism. The best tool in a malicious GM's arsenal is the claim that they're not deciding to dick you over, they're just 'following the rules' and you must be a whiny crybaby if you want the GM to make a special exception just for you and your vulnerable little feelings. The 5e skill rules exist to pass the buck from the design to the GM, to make sure that any failures get blamed on individual GMs 'playing incorrectly' and not on the 5e dev team's incompetence.

There are many problems with 5e. It is an awful system. But it is awful in the exact opposite way that this suggests.

Yes, because literally no people in all of history have uttered the words "show me in the rules where I'm wrong."

[Dean]

I agree with the concept of GM as director/producer. In an ideal world they are trying to put together the necessary pieces to create a piece of art and while actors and writers add important elements and pieces to it the overall artistic direction is decided by the GM.

I also think, at it's best, theres a little bit of being a conductor in an orchestra. You have all these pieces and sections vying to be heard and you want to pull some in and fade others to the background. That's really fun and satisfying and kind of required to get those really wonderful scenes that feel like movies, where you need to put lenses on different people and move the "camera" around to different parts of the scene to get the emotional impact you want from it.

People who want to abuse a system will preferentially choose a system where an abundance of rules exist to shield the GM from criticism. The best tool in a malicious GM's arsenal is the claim that they're not deciding to dick you over, they're just 'following the rules' and you must be a whiny crybaby if you want the GM to make a special exception just for you and your vulnerable little feelings.

I don't agree with that at all and I think it's demonstrably the opposite of true. Rules exist as a lever for every other person at the table to claim narrative control. If I have 30hp I don't die from the knife wound I was given, I die when I hit 0hp. In a low to no rules system I die whenever the GM feels like it. If I can fly I get to say I can fly, if I can teleport I get to say when that happens as well. The GM is empowered by social contract to make things up whereas everyone else is required to justify their declarations with rule backing. This is why gygaxian DM's have always preferred a "rulings over rules" approach, because rules can prevent them from excersizing whatever whims they desire.

No GM in my history of gaming has ever been able to lord the rules over me. I know the rules, so I know and have agreed to their application by showing up. I have definitely had GM's make up things or ignore rules in an attempt to run whatever railroad they wanted.

A ref can't abuse basketball players by enforcing the rules of basketball. The rules are there so that the ref doesn't just have to decide who wins. Rules empower the players of a game.

[jt]

I don't think breaking things down by how much power the GM exercises is the best way to look at things. The GM is expected to wear a lot of hats, the keys are how well they perform these and how they balance them when they conflict.

Game designer - RPGs are not batteries-included, and also the rules are often shit. Does the GM do rules patches? Homebrew? Write their own adventures? How good are they at these things? Is the content (especially encounters) balanced?

Arbitrator - The GM is expected to make rulings when the rules are unclear, missing, contradictory, or hard to find. Are the rulings consistent? Believable? Fair? What's their bar for making something up instead of going to find a rule (and how much do they just have memorized)?

Entertainer - The GM is responsible for making sure everyone has fun. This is part game design and rulings, but sometimes the rules aren't fun, how does the GM handle that? This is part acting, does the GM do silly voices or what? Both plot threads and player agency are fun, but they can easily be at odds with each other, so how does the GM reconcile that?

Balancing mechanism - The rules are often dumb, not every encounter is balanced, combat is swingy due to death spirals in most games, sometimes the players fail to follow an obvious plot thread or solve a simple puzzle, sometimes the GM miss-judges the party's abilities. How does the GM resolve these problems? This is frequently at odds with being an arbitrator, since consistent rulings don't ensure consistent results across contexts (and there are dice involved).

[Grek]

No GM in my history of gaming has ever been able to lord the rules over me. I know the rules, so I know and have agreed to their application by showing up. I have definitely had GM's make up things or ignore rules in an attempt to run whatever railroad they wanted.

There are rules which empower the player and rules which empower the GM. The later category are found in the Monster Manual, the DMG and in AP guides. NPCs, gotcha monsters, cursed items, traps. When the DM wants to lord the rules over the player, they do it by having Elminster show up and geas them into doing a quest. Or by having a mimic eat the party rogue. Or with an Ethereal Filcher that steals the exact item that would spoil the DM's fun with its +fuckoff Sleight of Hand check and ability to vanish to the Ethereal Plane as a free action. It's rust monsters, cursed amulets that make you think you can read people's minds even though you can't, and ecologically inexplicable snakes that lurk in keyholes waiting to bite your eyeballs if you try to peek through.

Compare a game like Fate. If the GM declares that your character had their gun stolen by a pickpocket three scenes ago without you noticing, you will call bullshit and the GM will have to explain themselves. In Fate, this comes down to social status, bullshitting skill and how much the players are willing to tolerate idiotic plot contrivances. In 3.5, there is a pre-packaged explanation in the Monster Manual and a baked in assumption that anything in the book is fair game for the GM to throw at you. 5e is more like Fate in this regard - most of the gotcha monsters are gone, and those that aren' are defanged - the mimic has a worse grapple check than the average fighter and the succubus is explicitly called out as wanting to talk the PCs into doing crimes rather than trying to charm monster the paladin and murder him in his tent.

Do OSR types like "rulings over rules" because it empowers the GM? Sure. But that is a standard that applies to the player rules, not to the GM rules. When it comes to GM rules, they instead want a lovingly curated list of awful gotchas and cursed shit to spring on their players at will. With as much mechanical detail as possible and no regard to whether it is especially fair to the player that accidentally steps in the results of these DM wank sessions. Insofar as 5e has anything going for it, it is that the lack of rules includes a lack of built in GM gotchas. There's no "NPCs get a +10 bonus vs Bluff if they don't wanna do it" or "DC 30 or higher to understand DM plot contrivances" baked right into the rules. There's just whatever the DM can talk the party into, absent any support from the book one way or another.

[Iduno]

So Grek's dumbass argument is "old-school D&D was designed for lord Gygax to shit all over players, and less than 100% of that has been excised. Therefore, all games other than FATE exist only for GMs to shit all over players."?


Edit: I don't pay attention enough to know that Grek is a dumbass, but it sounds like bad DMs bad-touched you and you're gun-shy.

[Grek]

What I'm getting at is that the level of DM fuckery and the system complexity are orthogonal values, with any given rule added to your system being a vector* in that cartesian plane. Some rules decrease the level of DM fuckery while increasing the complexity of the system. Others increase the level of DM fuckery instead, while still increasing the complexity of the system. Occasionally, adding a new rule reduces the (effective) complexity of a system without any measurable impact on DM fuckery - taking 10, for example. Either way, you can't say MORE RULES GOOD, RULES LITE SUX and expect to have contributed anything meaningful to game design discussions.

*Not exactly a vector, because each rule depends on all the others in a polynomial fashion, but whatever you get the idea.

[Iduno]

you can't say MORE RULES GOOD, RULES LITE SUX .

People who want to abuse a system will preferentially choose a system where an abundance of rules exist to shield the GM from criticism.

"You can't say one way is good and the other is bad unless you say my way is good and the other way is bad."

[Username17]

People who want to abuse a system will preferentially choose a system where an abundance of rules exist to shield the GM from criticism.

I disagree with this completely. The 90s happened. Storyteller games were a thing. The OSR was a thing.

The idea of extensive but knowable rules has cropped up multiple times with like GURPS and 3rd Edition D&D and stuff, and every time it has been a backlash against the "MC is god, and should wave their dick around as much as possible" games of the time. And the people who have rejected those games have mostly done so from the standpoint of not getting their knob waxed enough when players knew the rules.

I lived in a world where in 1999 the biggest games were 2nd edition D&D and Vampire: the Masquerade and in 2000 the biggest game in town was 3rd edition D&D and it absolutely went hand in hand with a significant and obvious reduction in abuse from behind the MC screen. It was very obvious at the time, and even clearer in retrospect.

And the grognards who weren't on board, the ones that went and made the Old School Revival, absolutely came into it with the explicit viewpoint that they wanted the MC to wave their dick around more.

Obviously there are arguments to be had about more and less detailed rules, but the general trend is pretty obviously that more power-tripping MCs gravitate towards looser rulesets.

-Username17

[Grek]

"You can't say one way is good and the other is bad unless you say my way is good and the other way is bad."

Gasp, things can have both bad and good aspects simultaneously, and worse yet, superficially similar features can have good impacts in one case and bad impacts in another case! However will we make decisions if things we dislike are not 100% obviously and straight-forwardly yet fracticaly awful at every level and things that we do like are not self-evidently 100% perfect at all times? It's not as if developing a nuanced assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses of a system compared to its alternatives is a thing that you could do. Oh wait, we can do exactly that.

There is no way to determine whether adding a particular rule to your system will make better or worse without first examining that rule and working out its broader consequences. If you say 'more rules = more bad', you will be wrong about half the time. If you say 'less rules = less bad' you will also be wrong about half the time. There is no simple linear relationship between the number of rules and the quality of a game. You actually do have to look at what rules you're writing and try really hard to include good rules but not include bad rules. There is no royal road.

---

FATE is what you get if you start from magic tea party and add the bare minimum number of rules to justify publishing a book. It contains a minimum of DM fuckery because it contains a minimum of everything.

2e is what you get when the low hanging fruit of good system design are implemented by a talented amateur in an era of nothing but amateurs. It contains a fair bit of DM fuckery because they were basically adding shit at random to a core of interesting ideas.

OSR is what you get if you take 2e and allow power-tripping GMs accrete as many layers of DM fuckery as they think they can get away with on top of it. It is extremely dickish and that is on purpose.

3.5e is what you get if you purposefully iterate on 2e and do your best to removing bad ideas and add good ideas. It is a considerable improvement on 2e, and as Frank points out, there is a very good reason why it became so popular. It may not be the Holy Immaculate System that beats all others, but doing better than 3.5 is still the bare minimum you have to do in order honestly to declare your rules to be worth paying money for.

4e is what happens if you let a team of incompetents try to repeat the successes of 3.5 via committee while simultaneously cribbing ideas from the tangentially related field of MMO design. Less fuckery than 3.5, but only because it was diluted with procedurally generated garbage just like everything else in the system was.

Pathfinder is what you get if you take a clone of 3.5 and allow disinterested freelancers to add rules at random for cash. There's certainly a great deal of content, but very little of it is good and the net effect is to water the game down toward generic RPG product.

5e is what you get if you take a mixture of all prior D&D writing (including a hefty scoop of OSR stuff) then delete rules at random in hopes that rules-lite Jesus will save your system's soul (and get you out of having to do actual work). The overall level of fuckery is about the same, but it is located in different, often unexpected places.

Bearworld is what you get if you start from magic tea party and allow an incredibly pretentious pervert to add shit until he is satisfied with the results. It contains exactly as much DM fuckery as the Bakers want there to be, which is apparently quite a lot.

Mutants and Masterminds is what happens if you start from nothing, add lots of complicated and fiddly rules describing how player abilities work, stumble into a few clever ways to make DM fuckery unrewarding to the DM and then iterate upon that for three editions. It has other problems (like being wildly unbalanced), but it's definitely fuckery-lite.

I disagree with this completely. The 90s happened. Storyteller games were a thing. The OSR was a thing.

Storyteller games follow the same pattern of writing in big dicked DMPCs into the setting and player-facing gotchas into the rules as any other high-fuckery system. Blood hunts, Sabbat-Camarilla feuds, Dying instantly if you looked at the sun, blood bonding, a society where there's no possibility of advancement - all of these are intentional rules and setting elements added to the game in order to promote DM fuckery. While yes, there are places where they explicitly declined to give rules (because that would give the players something to latch onto for leverage), there are also many places where the system explicitly encourages the DM to fuck with the players and insists that she is playing incorrectly if she refrains from doing so.

[Trill]

It contains a minimum of DM fuckery because it contains a minimum of everything.

That's like saying people can't fuck with you because there are no rules.
GM fuckery is usually in spite of rules.
"Oh, those guys tailing you can't be seen even with the best perception roll? Whatever"
"No, your healing potion doesn't work/Heals only a little bit"
FATE is foremost in DM fuckery because they control even more than usual. With even less ways of controlling their work.

[Chamomile]

Wait. I'm arguing with Grek aka Silva
I'm out

Dude what? What the Hell is this accusation? Grek joined in 2009, Silva joined four years later and was defined by his relentless shilling for the works of Vincent Baker, someone whom Grek derided in this very thread. This accusation doesn't line up at all!

[Trill]

sorry, mixed up Greg and Guts

[OgreBattle]

The role of game master and player is to have fun at the table, different strokes for different folks. Like there's all kinds of BDSM roles and group dynamics yeah?



In tabletop RPG's, people usually stop having fun when they feel their actions don't matter, or they know exactly what to do but it requires another round of rolling the dice to chip away at hit points.

I had a good rules lite fantasy adventure as a game master, but I planned every round to give the players one of the following experiences

Introduction- A new threat appears
Development- The result of previous actions, elements
Twist- A previous action lead to an unexpected result
Conclusion- Threat finished

GM as mostly impartial referee: The theoretical role of the GM in early editions of D&D, although for various reasons the Viking Hat GM seems to occupy the memetic space of what actually went on. Exists only to impersonally enforce the rules, with a bit of tweaking to patch any holes in them or adjudicate situations not covered by them.

I get the impression that Gygax wrote down the Kill-You stuff on paper beforehand, then let his players bumble into them.

[Omegonthesane]

It contains a minimum of DM fuckery because it contains a minimum of everything.

That's like saying people can't fuck with you because there are no rules.
GM fuckery is usually in spite of rules.
"Oh, those guys tailing you can't be seen even with the best perception roll? Whatever"
"No, your healing potion doesn't work/Heals only a little bit"
FATE is foremost in DM fuckery because they control even more than usual. With even less ways of controlling their work.

As Grek said before, no rules for the GM to abide by also means no rules for the GM to hide behind. The OSR have quite a lot of rules explicitly to cater to GM fuckery.

If you roll your best skill that you statted to make the best and roll Texas and it isn't enough and there is no rule to point to that makes it not enough, the GM has tipped their fucking hand almost as clearly as if they violated a printed rule.

[Trill]

no rules for the GM to abide by also means no rules for the GM to hide behind.

see, this is where I realize we may have different views of bad GMs
In your view bad GMs like to hide behind rules, using them to justify why it's all right that the PCs don't succeed.
In my view bad GMs don't give a fuck. Having no rules mean they can assert stuff without having to worry about players citing any rules against it. They know that they are in a better bargaining position (considering that the ration players:GM is heavily skewed towards the former it is far easier to replace players than GMs)

Or in other words:
In your view bad GMs would say "Well, the rules clearly state that trying to evade notice means a Vehicle Test with Threshold 5. Oh, you didn't make it? Well, make the test again to avoid crashing. Failed again? Well, take 4 physical damage"
In my view bad GMs would say "Hmm, you're trying to tail those guys? Roll. A 27? Nope, not enough. They notice you."

[Omegonthesane]

Even when they have a literal monopoly, bad GMs have to compete with "staying home and wanking instead of playing D&D". And once they demonstrate that they aren't actually willing to provide a good game, why give them another chance?